Cyborg Bodies Research Articles

Modular Bodies of Animated Characters and Posthumanist Connotations. Translation into Russian

This article discusses the molecularization of the body and the meanings pointed out via cyborg bodies in the context of animated characters. We analyze films of Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995), Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045- Sustainable War (Shinji Aramaki Michihito and Fujii Kenji Kamiyama, 2021), Gunnm (Hiroshi Fukutomi, 1993), and Alita: Battle Angel (Robert Rodriguez, 2019) in the context of related philosophical discussions. We carry out the discussion about the body on two axes. First, we examine forms of presenting the modular bodies and discuss their socio-cultural connections. In these narratives, the evolution of the body beyond organic boundaries transforms it into a space where the character reflects the subjectivity and a tool that offers a narcissistic experience of omnipotence regarding bodily strength and competence. However, it sometimes causes the characters to become alienated from their bodies and engage in existential inquiries. Thus, secondly, we examine the existential inquiries/crises of the characters arising from the modularization of their bodies and the philosophical connotations that these emphases indicate. If on this axis, posthumanist arguments that stand out with objections to Cartesian distinctions such as machine-human, mind-body, woman-man, and anthropocentric approaches constitute the focus of the discussions.

Gender, Body, And Posthuman: A Selected Study Of Natural History by Justina Robson

The study aims to explore the Posthuman cyborg bodies in cyberpunk fiction. The gendered bodies in cyberpunk fiction are complicated, unclear, and open to investigation in various ways. The researcher employs Baxter's FPDA as a theoretical and methodological framework to study how the writer presents gendered bodies in cyberpunk fiction and the roles of posthuman cyborgs in it. Data analysis of Robson's novel Natural History shows that modern cyberpunk fiction has the power to deconstruct and reconstruct traditionally gendered bodies and presents a new form of bodies that are fluid, complex, and sometimes beyond imagination. These bodies are robust and flexible and transform into many forms to give new meanings to gendered bodies.

The body of law: boundaries, extensions, and the human right to physical integrity in the biotechnical age.

The body is precondition of human existence and reference point of many legal norms. But the law only rarely asks what the body is more precisely. Answers might appear evident, but commonsensical conceptions of the body have been cast into doubt by feminists, artists, and disability theorists. Drawing on polyphonic arguments, they suggest social or post-human reconceptualizations with potential legal implications. Civil rights activists call for better protection of cyborg bodies; some legal scholars suggest redefining or even dismissing the right to bodily integrity because of its uncertain foundations. Of particular importance is the question of the boundaries of the body because the legal treatment of prostheses and assistive devices depends on whether they are part of it. This paper analyzes these boundaries with a focus on the right to bodily integrity, in light of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the foundational legal distinction between persons and things. It argues that bodies indeed have multiple boundaries, but none of them qualifies for legal purposes. The law must thus draw normative boundaries. Against the temper of times, it should resort to a naturalistic conception because it accommodates interests of stakeholders in the best way.

When One Becomes Two

In the Netherlands, where cycling is part of the “national habitus,” bicycle infrastructure is remarkably similar to car infrastructure. This article explores man–machine hybridization in the context of this spatial environment made for bikes, analyzing it through notions of human/nonhuman hybrids, cyborg bodies, and automobilized persons. The perceptions of urban cyclists who temporarily cannot cycle are explored, based on interviews with bike repair shop customers in Amsterdam. How does a broken bike impact their perception of themselves and the city? Within the sample, cyclists attribute an essential, corporeal value to their vehicles, regarding them as extensions of the body. Cycling is considered the natural way of moving through urban space, associated with freedom and independence; switching to public transportation induces feelings of dependence and handicap.

The ‘Working Body’: Interrogating and Reimagining the Productivist Impulses of Transhumanism through Crip-Centered Speculative Design

Appeals to ‘nature’ have historically led to normative claims about who is rendered valuable. These understandings elevate a universal, working body (read able-bodied, white, producing capital) that design and disability studies scholar Aimi Hamraie argues ‘has served as a template […] for centuries’ (2017: 20), becoming reified through our architectural, political, and technological infrastructures. Using the framing of the cyborg, we explore how contemporary assistive technologies have the potential to both reproduce and trouble such normative claims. The modern transhumanism movement imagines cyborg bodies as self-contained and invincible, championing assistive technologies that seek to assimilate disabled people towards ever-increasing standards of independent productivity and connecting worth with the body's capacity for labor. In contrast, disability justice communities see all bodies as inherently worthy and situated within a network of care-relationships. Rather than being invincible, the cripborg's relationship with technology is complicated by the ever-present functional and financial constraints of their assistive devices. Despite these lived experiences, the expertise and agency of disabled activist communities is rarely engaged throughout the design process. In this article, we use speculative design techniques to reimagine assistive technologies with members of disability communities, resulting in three fictional design proposals. The first is a manual for a malfunctioning exoskeleton, meant to fill in the gaps where corporate planned obsolescence and black-boxed design delimit repair and maintenance. The second is a zine instructing readers on how to build their own intimate prosthetics, emphasizing the need to design for pleasurable, embodied, and affective experience. The final design proposal is a city-owned fleet of assistive robots meant to push people in manual wheelchairs up hills or carry loads for elderly people, an example of an environmental adaptation which explores the problems of automating care. With and through these design concepts, we begin to explore assistive devices that center the values of disability communities, using design proposals to co-imagine versions of a more crip-centered future.

Unconquerable Heroes: Invictus, Redemption, and the Cultural Politics of Narrative

The wounded veteran is a challenging subject for the state. These subjects must be narratively managed and reclaimed in ways which both recognize the violence of warfare and render critical responses inappropriate. Using the example of the Invictus Games, this paper argues that the wounded military body can be recast through emotional-political narratives of techno-heroic redemption. Through the display of ‘cyborg bodies’, elite sports men and women with prosthetic limbs, wheelchairs and national flags draped around their shoulders, the Games have become performance of a posthuman body, with a ‘more-than-human’ capacity to transgress boundaries of human capability. This paper contributes to existing literatures on the politics of veteran injury, sport and war, and to wider debates regarding the regulation of violence and narratives of war by the liberal state, and raises questions about who may be written out of the Invictus story.

Transmobility: Possibilities in Cyborg (Cripborg) Bodies

This creative, experimental contribution blends written words and sketches depicting our crip bodies engaging with various mobility technologies, including crutches, walkers, prosthetic limbs, and manual and power wheelchairs. By picturing and describing our crip bodies with varieties of technologies that we use, we use these pictures and corresponding narratives about disabled bodies in technology to tell a larger story about the constitution of disability with technologies, as well as the modes of mobility available to disabled bodies. Our visual and narrative elements serve to argue that disabled bodies have a wider array of mobilities and ways of being than are afforded to non-disabled bodies. We resist super-crippery and insist on cripborgery. Crip bodies are taken as sites of possibility, adaptation, and creative reflection.

Collaborative Guerrilla in the Cities: the Antena Mutante Collective in Colombia

The present article is part of the results of the study of collaborative resistance processes in the city of Medellin, Colombia. The methodology consisted of documentary analysis and interviews with members of the Antena Mutante collective. What this text proposes is a descriptive case study regarding the main actions of the collective Antena Mutante to contribute to the contours of a useful notion for the investigation of urban groups that is the notion of collaborative guerrillas. To characterize and describe some of the main collaborative guerrilla strategies of the collective Antena Mutante we recognized three tactics that are interconnected in a transversal way in the actions: 1) cartography and interruptions in the urban space, 2) connections in the cooperation meshes transnational and 3) visibilizacion and cyborg bodies.

Uma revoada de entidades: o que enxameia a atuação dos streamers nas jornadas de junho de 2013?

Resumo O espaço das manifestações enredadas com aquelas de junho de 2013, no Brasil, foi vivificado por mediadores que dispunham de corpos ciborgues, provisoriamente no sentido de Lemos (2013). A cada vez que gritam os híbridos, somos interpelados a pensar a especificidade do que entendemos como natureza humana. Para Latour (1994), deve-se devolver ao humano a outra metade de si mesmo: a parte das coisas. De que é feito, então, o humano? Máquinas, objetos, política, religião, economia, natureza; numa conversa revolta e nada determinista. Selvagem e inconstante. O corpo do streamer, no âmbito das manifestações afinadas com as jornadas de junho, seria protótipo dessa constituição. O que agencia essa revoada de entidades? Em que medida esse corpo transgride a si próprio em busca do outro que não é o mesmo – embora o seja por natureza?

‘Time to ride the monster train’: multiplicity, the Midnighter and the threat to hegemonic superhero masculinity

ABSTRACTThis article is concerned with how and why a figure such as DC’s Midnighter might be able both to enact the current discourse of ideal masculinity and humanity in comic books, and to usurp that discourse in order to generate new understandings which grapple with the ever-imminent realities of posthuman cyborg bodies and openly lived LGBTQIA+ experiences in a way that does not merely dismiss them as subhuman. It utilises posthumanism, monster theory, queer theory, feminist criticism, and ‘body’ theory in an analysis of the Midnighter in his New 52 run under DC, in order to take a critical look at the multiplicity of the Midnighter’s identity to identify what makes him into such ‘a rare and violent snowflake’, and to demonstrate humanity’s embedded monstrosity.

The cyborgification of paralympic sport

Depuis le debut du siecle, le mouvement paralympique a acquis un profil grand public. Nous allons faire valoir, qu’il resulte directement de l’attention mediatique portee aux nouvelles technologies de la prothetique qui ont contribue a creer une legion de corps cyborg qui se manifeste a l’image du supermarche sportif contemporain. Cet article souligne le developpement d’une ideologie technocentrique qui a ete adoptee dans le mouvement paralympique. En adoptant cette ideologie, le Comite international paralympique (IPC) a commence a celebrer la cyborgification des organes paralympiques. En fin de compte, cet article se demande si les progres de la technologie habilitent actuellement tous les athletes handicapes ou simplement ceux qui ont le potentiel d’etre cyborgs.

“You sound a little nervous”: The Disappearing Body and Identity Crises in Jonathan Goldstein’s WireTap

“You sound a little nervous”:The Disappearing Body and Identity Crises in Jonathan Goldstein’s WireTap Marcelle Kosman (bio) In the 1960s, media theorist marshall mcluhan posited the impossibility of understanding a culture without understanding its technologies. He argued that “culture and technology are inseparable because the effect of any new technology is so far-reaching as to reshape the culture that embraces it” (Gordon 14). Half a century later, David Bell similarly observed that in order to understand how “people and digital technologies interact, how we live together […] we need to look at the stories that are told about these ways of life; stories that have material, symbolic and experiential variants” (5). Given the recent ubiquity of online communications tools like Facebook, Twitter, and blogging in urban Canadian culture, Jonathan Goldstein’s cbc radio program WireTap may be one of the most culturally relevant records of the ways Canadians have struggled to adapt to digital technologies over the last decade.1 If, as Bell suggests, we look at what WireTap tells us about how we experience and live with new media, we find a pattern of anxieties associated with the body’s inability to master rapidly changing communications media and the potential threats they pose to the users’ autonomy. [End Page 65] WireTap was a weekly half-hour radio drama launched in 2004 and concluded in 2015.2 It starred creator Jonathan Goldstein and a supporting cast of Goldstein’s real-world friends, family, and industry peers. Throughout its eleven seasons the program documented a litany of technological changes, most commonly through self-parody. Goldstein’s character Jonathan3 is overwhelmed by the increasing presence of digital technologies in his life that gradually render his corporeal, material body irrelevant. The ways in which the program looks at relationships between bodies and technology resonates with what Donna Haraway says of the “boundary between science fiction and social reality”: that it is “an optical illusion” (8). The observations Haraway advances in her seminal work “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” remain apt today, something that can likewise be said of McLuhan’s cultural analysis of the 1960s. Haraway states, “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs […] a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation” (8). WireTap extrapolates the transformation Haraway identifies, examining the joining of material body and digital technologies in such a way as to both reflect and parody the potential outcomes of such hybridizing. Where Haraway positions the transition to cyborg bodies as apocalyptic, arguing that “the cyborg is also the apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space” (9), WireTap demonstrates the digital end of this untying, presenting its main character Jonathan as a man in cyberspace. Throughout this paper I examine several WireTap episodes that productively demonstrate a convergence of Haraway’s feminist cyborg and McLuhan’s theory of media in our increasingly digitized environment. The point of this examination is not cautionary; WireTap’s parodic representation of new media eschews technological determinism in favour of innovative and imaginative cultural analysis. Nevertheless, the scenarios presented in WireTap suggest risks that digital media pose to the futurity of Haraway’s feminist cyborg given the possibility of the digital media’s wholesale erasure of the human body. [End Page 66] Technology and the body Although most of the communications technologies examined in WireTap are easily recognizable by listeners, the plots in which characters struggle to navigate new media offer an unexpected look at the challenges of online identity construction and privacy—even when those technologies are fodder for parody. In the episodes highlighted in this paper, Jonathan’s radio show “WireTap” parodies Goldstein’s innovative WireTap by stressing Jonathan’s alienation from new technologies. Typically these plots, however ludicrous, position Jonathan as desperately behind the times and at risk of irrelevance. He is regularly harassed into keeping up with changing forms of communication to improve (or even just to maintain) both his career...

The reanimation of the digital (un)dead, or how to regenerate bodies in digital cinema

Media have complicated relationships with death. Often when a new medium emerges and develops, it is imagined as a channel of contacting, capturing, or otherwise mediating invisible presences. Thematic and visual tropes of ghosts, phantoms, mummies, doppelgangers, and other spectral phenomena have been invoked to describe the uncanny doubling and disembodying effects of photography, cinema, electronic and digital media, as well as visions of the afterlife offered by such media technologies. Jacques Derrida writes that, ‘every period has its ghosts, its own experience, its own medium, and its proper hauntological media’ (1994, 193). The cinematic medium is particularly inviting to forms of the undead because of its uncanny capacity to record and reanimate ghostly residues of the past. Bodies continue to regenerate in contemporary digital cinema. In digital media, the undead are often reanimated, good as new, either reproduced in the same form, or reincarnated as an enhanced body composed of varying amalgams of organic, mechanic, and cybernetic parts. Mobilising Marxist concepts of dead and living labour and Derrida’s hauntological approach, this article examines the phenomenon of new perceptions and depictions of death (or after-death) in the hybrid environments of contemporary cinema: the reanimation of the digital (un)dead. I focus on incarnations of the digital undead in two films that deploy different modes and techniques of animation: ParaNorman (2012) and Avatar (2009). This article interrogates how we live (and die) as a human in a posthuman world and what it means to be human amid the emerging promise of posthumous existence through digital reanimation. I suggest that these films are emblematic of the current visual culture of digital enhancement or regeneration of the human body into hybrid cyborg bodies, which embody the paradox of a dead, yet animated existence, or a no-longer-human, yet all-too-human body.

Cyborg Bodies—Self-Reflections on Sensory Augmentations

Sensory augmentation challenges current societal norms and views of what is conceived as a “normal” human being. Beginning with self reflections of a bodyhacker, the author proposes an extended view onto the human or respectively cyborg body. Based on cognitive theories, it is argumented that we are already mental cyborgs. Our brains plastically restructure themselves in order to meet new requirements of the technological extended human.

Aren’t Athletes Cyborgs?: Technology, Bodies, and Sporting Competitions

Aren’t Athletes Cyborgs?: Technology, Bodies, and Sporting Competitions Rayvon Fouché (bio) In a special edition about the idea and the proliferation of the term “viral,” it is more than appropriate to consider the work of Donna Haraway. I, and I assume many others, first met Donna Haraway in class. For me it was as a graduate student in science and technology studies that I first encountered “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” The conceptualization of cyborgs as a strange melding of human organic/biological material with any of a multitude of technoscientific artifacts was a new and refreshing intellectual taste that was familiar, but distinctly different from my everyday diet of social constructionist meditations on technological and scientific practice. Haraway’s cyborg theorization has spread like a virus (minus the sickness-inducing pathogens) through academic and nonacademic communities. It is viral in that it has relatively silently and efficiently spread across multiple disciplinary domains. It is also viral because it has been reproduced and replicated so often that its origin has been obfuscated. Thus, in the context of virality of Haraway’s cyborg, is there a place to say anything new? Doubtful. But there may still exist small windows to contemplate splicing cyborg ideas into new places and spaces. This essay will move in this more fruitful direction. That is, how can the concept of “cyborg” be used to intervene and reconceptualize commonly understood notions of gender, bodies, identity, and community? Of course, taken as a whole this is a monumental task. I will take a small slice of the pie and center my discussion on the world of sport and think about the ways the “cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as on part of needed political work” (Haraway 1991, 154). [End Page 281] My point of entry may seem a strange departure point, but sport is one locale where cyborg bodies have been not only accepted but also embraced. The rhetoric about freakish bodies producing unnatural performances has been a familiar refrain within commentaries about sport. Yet the popular mythology about sport is that competitions should be fair and in this fairness the best man, woman, or body should win (Magdalinski 2009). But even as the most casual grade school playground kickball participant knows, the world of sport is far from fair and equal. Sport is about creating, exploiting, and maintaining inequalities, or what is more commonly known as competitive advantages. Competitive advantages can be acquired in many ways, but the history of sport in the twentieth century has been about gaining a competitive edge through the use of technoscientific artifacts attached to the body or integrated into the body or a change in body mechanics. In the early 1960s, Dick Fosbury changed the body mechanics of high-jumping by developing a new body technique demanding that a competitor reorient his or her body to the bar. If one views the body as a machine, this new technique can be seen as a technological innovation (van Hilvoorde, Vos, and de Wert 2007). Initially there was concern that Fosbury’s new method of high-jumping undermined the integrity of the event. But the fact that this technique was in theory learnable by all and did not alter or add anything appreciable to the body quelled objections to the “Fosbury Flop.” However, discussions, debates, and legal battles about which artifactual technologies can and should be attached to or used by a body and those technologies that influence the internal dynamics of a body drive much of the popular discourse about technology and sport. The dominant internal technologies fall under the broad category of “doping” (Møller 2010). The sheer invisibility of these technologies is part of what makes them so effective for competitors and troubling for fans and sport governing bodies. External technologies like overly hydrodynamic swimming suits and seemingly erratic balls seen in the 2008 Olympics and the 2010 World Cup, respectively, received many complaints from fans and competitors alike. In general the same concern is raised about external and internal technologies. They are both perceived as unleveling the playing field by sublimating the natural human body to technology. By...

The ‘unfinished’ subject: Pedagogy and performance in the company of copies, robots, mutants and cyborgs

ABSTRACTThe posthuman perspective, which suggests that the boundaries of the human being are undergoing constant revision, has grown as a paradigm for analysis of the connection between technology and the body in contemporary performance practice. This article explores the potential of a ‘posthuman pedagogy’ and its relation to practices of multimedia performance. It suggests an approach to learning that considers specific manifestations of the posthuman being within pedagogical process, encourages students to examine their own existence within a ‘posthuman condition’, and positions the learner as part of a network of material and mediatized components. Various manifestations of ‘posthuman bodies’ within performance are identified such as the ‘copying’ of the body, robotic or cyborg bodies, and ‘mutating’ bodies. To explain the position of the human body within a posthuman world, it is asserted that the posthuman does not involve the ‘death of self, nor the death of the liberal humanist subject, but the re-conception of the self as ‘unfinished’. Finally, posthumanism is framed as a perspective on education that shifts the direction of learning from the traditional doctrine of internalizing knowledge, to a model of experience and practice that connects the student with the material world, and is particularly relevant to drama and theatre studies.

Cyborg and Supercrip: The Paralympics Technology and the (Dis)empowerment of Disabled Athletes

Over the last two decades the Paralympic Games have gained a high public profile. As a result there has been an ever increasing commercial marketplace for aerodynamic and feather light racing (wheel)chairs as well as biomechanically and ergonomically responsive prostheses that have helped create a legion of cyborg bodies that is manifest in the image of the sporting supercrip. Mobility devices that enhance performance have also created a divide between different impairment groups and also amongst ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ nations. This article highlights the development of a technocentric ideology within the Paralympic Movement that has led to the cyborgification of some Paralympic bodies. It questions whether the advances in technology are actually empowering disabled athletes.

Hybridity and Identity

Hybridity and Identity Linda M. Scott This issue of Advertising & Society Review brings together four original articles around a general theme of "Hybridity and Identity." Both hybridity and identity are frequent topics in a range of academic discourses about new communications technologies, gender performance, immigration, and globalization. The notion of a cultivated, fluid identity, rather than a fixed, core essence has become a common way of thinking about the self. The hybridity resulting from rapid change, the formation of diasporas, and cross-group memberships has taken the place of previous assumptions about the primacy of clearly defined group memberships. Such fluid concepts of the self and the social speak to the massive movements of peoples, the fusion of cultures in forms from music to cuisine, and the Third Culture Kids who increasingly populate the planet. Thus, there become many points at which one may observe a kind of liquidity among consumers in their definitions of social compartments that once were very solid. The authors here have investigated several of these. In the first article, "A Typology of Men's Conceptualizations of Ideal Masculinity in Advertising," Linda Tuncay Zayer reports the findings of a qualitative study that asked young men to articulate their concepts of "ideal masculinity," as expressed or reflected in advertising. A wider range of masculine profiles than one might have expected even twenty years ago emerges from this data, with interesting areas of overlap. In addition, several oppositional models of negative masculinity also emerge. From these data, we can observe a sea of changes in the notions of what a man should be, including, interestingly, an apparently diminished need to avoid the appearance of being feminine. Such changes in what anchors ideal notions of heterosexual masculinity, then, set the stage for a more fluid and hybridized sense of sexuality, such as is observed and interpreted in "Assimilating the Queers: Representations of Lesbians, Gay Men, Bisexual, and Transgender People in Mainstream Advertising," by Wan-Hsui Sunny Tsai. New ground is broken by Tsai by analyzing the representation of "queerness" across several categories of sexuality, as seen in television commercials as opposed to print ads. In the process, Tsai shows the way ads tend to "tame the dangerous gender and sexual outlaws," making them nearly indistinguishable from heterosexuals, but also creating a new, consumption-oriented stereotype of this community in which "enormous disposable incomes, high-end tastes, and conspicuous consumption" become the norm. Kavita Karan and Yang Feng in "The Emerging Hybrid Images of Women in China," investigate the effects of globalization on the representation of women in a fresh way. Rather than presume a dominance of local or Western imagery, the authors investigate a set of core images appearing and repeating to varying degrees in three different types of magazines available for purchase in China. The result is a much more sophisticated, sensitive, and localized look at the way femininity, national culture, and tradition interact with globalized consumer culture and the media. Finally, Norah Campbell, in "Future Sex: Cyborg Bodies and the Politics of Meaning," explores the hybridization of gendered identity in representations of cyborgs in advertising. Here, keen attention and well-grounded theoretical awareness come together to give us a new picture of our emergent ideas of human (and nonhuman) identity in an increasingly machine-focused culture. Copyright © 2010 The Advertising Educational Foundation, Inc.

Future Sex: Cyborg Bodies and the Politics of Meaning

This article investigates the visual representations of futuristic, technologized bodies in advertisements. Why is an investigation of body images that do not exist of fundamental importance? While posthuman bodies may not have a corresponding reality in the world, these images present the future, complicating the meaning of the often under-examined concepts of (i) technology and (ii) humanness itself. This article spans areas as diverse as psychoanalysis, philosophy, fin de siècle literature, comic book strips, and art history. Technology emerges not as a mere tool that humans use, but a repository for human fears, fantasies, and desires; a distinct and powerful aesthetic that has evolved over time; and an ontology—a way of being in the world.

Mapping cyborg bodies, shifting identities, and national anxieties in Cyber Wars

Cyber Wars (2004) is Singapore's first science fiction feature film and one of the very few science fiction films to emerge from Southeast Asia. Set in Sintawan, a dystopic Asian city-state, the film showcases humans who have access to a range of technologies that can alter identity, restructure the organic body, or produce a virtual body. In twenty-first century Sintawan, all communication and financial data transactions are recorded by the Cyberlink, a virtual system that also serves as a repository for the identities of all legalized citizens. I argue that Cyber Wars, through its shifting cyborg bodies and its Chinese-infused Cyberlink, examines a key socio-cultural dilemma confronting contemporary Singapore. Namely, that the rise of China within the global marketplace raises uncomfortable questions of Singapore's own, very ambivalent, transnational Chinese identity in Southeast Asia.